Monday, April 20, 2009

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the best sandwiches in Bangkok, a rarity deserving UN World Heritage status. Today, my beloved bakery is being ripped apart, quite literally, by a band of marauding ninjas.

What will be the fate of my favourite house of Boulange? Will I ever find a Siamese sandwich to rival that of which I have loved so dearly? Will I be resorted to a firey hell of chilli and kaffir lime for the rest of my days???

Thursday, April 09, 2009

There's a terrific little French place up the road from my work that makes arguably the best sandwiches in Bangkok. Good bread is hard to find in this part of the world, theirs is excellent.

Anyway, went in there today for lunch, feeling like something a little different. After sitting down, a young waiter brings across the specials board - I notice the Chicken Niçoise salad.

Not entirely sure what I'm getting myself into, I ask the waiter, "can you please tell me what's in the Chicken Niçoise salad?" To which he replied nervously, "um, chicken and salad".

I couldn't help but smile.

Good on the bloke though for having a go at another language - I'd have no hope in describing the ingredients of a complex curry paste in Thai language.

I ended up enjoying their delicious potato and leek soup, along with a selection of fresh crusty bread on the side. Reminded me of watching the Brumbies play in 1996 on a Canberra winter night - Mum used to pack a couple of thermoses full of soup, along with enough other treats to feed us until Monday.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

I just enjoyed a delicious spag bol lunch and an inquisitive article from a recent edition of Fortune magazine.

Interviewing Facebook’s majority owner and the company CEO, the article asks a few questions about the business viability of Facebook, how marketers are currently using the site as a new consumer channel, and alludes to where Facebook will be in a couple of years time.

For those with no idea of how Facebook works, the article also provides a bit of a cheat sheet on the different components of the social networking site.

Friday, April 03, 2009

Not a bird, nor a plane, but a kangaroo has crashed through the bedroom window of a Canberra family's home before terrorising its unsuspecting occupants.

The family, from the suburb of Garran in Canberra's south, were awoken in the early hours of Sunday morning when their pet dog began barking from the garden.

Moments later, a kangaroo burst through a three-metre high window of the house's master bedroom and onto the bed where Beat Ettlin, his partner Verity Beman and their nine-year-olddaughter, Beatrix, lay.

"My initial thought when I was half awake was [that] it's a lunatic ninja coming through the window," Mr Ettlin told The Associated Press.

"It seems about as likely as a kangaroo breaking in."

While the family took refuge under the blankets, the injured animal proceeded to jump on top of them, gouging holes in the furniture and smearing blood all over the walls.

The next thing Mr Ettlin heard was his 10-year-old son Leighton screaming from his bed: "There's a 'roo in my room!"

"I thought, this can be really dangerous for the whole family now," the 42-year-old said.

A chef, originally from the Swiss city of Stans, Mr Ettlin followed the thrashing and bleeding two-metre tall marsupial and wrestled it into a headlock before dragging it down the hallway and out the front door.

Left wearing just his shredded underpants and with scratch marks on his leg and buttocks, Mr Ettlin described himself as "lucky".

I’m helping my main banking client reposition and redesign their website at the moment. It’s a bit of a mess - tough to navigate, overcomplicated language and expression, has no metrics and is cumbersome to update with new information.

On top of that, we need to do it in two very different languages and cultures.

It’s a tough job, as the bank is pretty conservative in its views, so ideas on how they can really smash the industry here from a web perspective are often difficult to get through. In a Buddhist country, it looks like I’ll have to be content with ‘the middle way’. It’s part of my job I really enjoy, and I can see some good things coming for the client…eventually!

Anyway, I’ve been checking out what other companies are doing with their websites. In my web travels, I came across ad agency Leo Burnett’s website. I may be well behind the eightball on this one, but with its unique and intuitive pencil navigation, this site is very engaging and underlines pretty much exactly what they want to tell prospective clients (and brag to their competitors about)…“We’re cool, creative, energetic people who work on big brands”.

So simple, but creative agencies so often overcomplicate their creds docs, alienating and losing the confidence of potential clients with fluff!

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Good news through about a rugby law that many readers of this blog won’t recognize, nor really give much of a ping ding.

For me, it’s great news – the rolling maul* looks like it will stay in its traditional form and won't be able to be pulled down. It takes skill and specialist pressure to build and sustain a well-formed maul, a team skill that should be rewarded. It also encourages more men to take up place in the set piece, opening up space out wide for the attacking side.